Omphalodes – and others

As a judgement for moaning about how horrible it was to contemplate clearing the weed from the pond, the fates sent a warm, sunny day. So I had no excuse. But at least I had spent the winter months tracking down a new ultra-cheap pair of thigh waders, so my feet remained dry. I shall spare you the horrid details – you can read about it here, if you are so inclined.  But the pond does look a lot better:

A plant I use extensively for early spring flowering in semi-shaded rough areas is omphalodes cappadocica. It makes a great substitute for forget-me-not, especially since you can totally forget it.

It’s a tough little perennial plant, spreading slowly on rooting tendrils. It’s quick into growth in spring (normally it would have flowered a month ago)  and it doesn’t seem to mind being partially swamped by grasses and weeds in high summer. The pure blue of its flower is most welcome at a time of year when not much else is in bloom.

Time to take a look at  another ‘difficult’ primula:

Primula handeliana. China, 3,000 metres, shade,  forest, ‘moss-covered rocks’. OK, I can do the moss and the rocks, and the shade, but only 300 metres, and I guess that makes the difference! I’ve lost this (twice) over winter, growing it in mossy shade, so I’m now trying it out in relatively well-shaded gravel backed by a grit-heavy compost underneath. We’ll see how we go….if it survives, I shall be very pleased.

It’s just wonderful when a new plant does something unexpected. In my previous post, I wrote about the unfurling leaves of glaucidium palmatum.  But, look – they weren’t leaves, they were flower stems – the leaves are just coming through now. Meanwhile, the flower buds  are pushing outwards as they rise above the soil.

A very slow spring

It’s still cold. Nine to eleven degrees, and a chill wind from the north-west. We’re at least four weeks later than last year (which was a disaster anyway, with its vicious late frosts).

As I’ve said before, I’m not unhappy. With everything held back, I’ve got on with a lot of things without the usual rush to clear weeds and mow grass. Turned the compost heap, dug new drains in an effort to make the bog garden less of a swamp, cleaned out the strawberries, manured the raspberries. And re-soiled the blue poppy beds, lifted and split their inhabitants. They are looking much happier than they were last year:

The early primulas are in full flower: Primula rosea enjoys having its roots in running water, but is equally happy in a damp bed.

I’m especially pleased that my primula melanantha survived the winter. I’ve kept it in its pot (I don’t normally like doing this) and sunk it into a fairly shady spot. It spent the months from September to March in the greenhouse, with only a tiny drip of water once a fortnight. Now it’s pushing out its velvety-black flowers.

On the subject of black, about five years ago, I stuck a black hellebore (helleborus niger) into the remains of a rotten tree stump under beech trees. The odd leaf appeared, but little else, and I wrote it off as a stupid error. But, lo and behold, the Christmas rose, flowering in May!

An alpine spring

A couple of posts ago, I wrote that snow in March never lasts long. I was wrong. Slowly, slowly, it is now starting to melt, but is still a foot or so deep in the shady parts of the garden where it drifted in the strong easterly wind.

Where the daffodils break through the snow, the sun-warmed air reaches into the hole they have made and melts the snow round each plant. Spiky bulb leaves do this, but flatter slow growing plants, such as cushion saxifrages, must wait. My scree bed lies under a cold blanket, except where a rabbit has passed – the sun widening out its tracks, so that it looks as if a gigantic Easter bunny has visited.

Since I constantly moan about warm, wet, winters and premature warmth in March, I’m actually happy with all this. It’s exactly what alpine plants need. Of course it is frustrating not to be barrowing compost and splitting blue poppy plants and all the other jobs that are now queuing up, but because of the cold and the snow, it’s less likely that May frosts will wipe out all the young growth, as happened last year.

And, where the snow melts, the early primulas rush into flower. Here is p.sonchifolia, breaking out of its resting bud and eagerly putting out its blooms before bothering to grow a stem. As you see, the leaves have suffered badly from frost. It’s an irony that many high-altitude primulas can be easily frost-damaged – the snow cover in their native mountains normally keeps them safe. Unfortunately, in Scotland the snow melted before the frosts were past. Such is life.

From here to Chelsea…

This morning, this was the state of the bed where I grow most of my Primula Inverewe:

A few weeks ago, I had an e-mail from Stella Rankin at Kevock,  asking for as many Inverewe as I could provide, since she had agreed to supply Nigel Dunnett for his show garden at Chelsea this year. The new growth on the primulas was scarcely through the ground at the time, but during the brief spell of dry weather we had, I managed to lift and split every clump here, and came up with 150 offshoots. Luckily, p.Inverewe clumps can be disentangled easily, unlike other of the candelabra tribe. I stuck the offshoots into liquid mud in groups of ten. Then the snow descended….

Picking the primulas back out of the icy mud was not a task to relish. But if they are going to be in flower for Chelsea, they are going to need warmth, and love. And they are not going to get much of either in the frozen wastes of Central Scotland. So I rushed them into Kevock, much as one rushes an urgent bag of blood plasma.

It takes a certain professional ability to see from the present to the future to be thrilled by a box of icy mud with a few green leaves sticking out of it. But Stella rose to occasion, and I got a hug for my pains.

Professional nurseries are bleak places in winter. Odd to think that in a few months, all these bare tables will be covered with flowering plants ready to be despatched southwards to London to give the crowds something to gasp at.  Personally, I’ll sit back and admire my primulas on the TV  at the Gardeners’ world Chelsea special. They look better in a proper garden, anyway.

Primula melanantha – the new black

For those of us who keep an eye on the goings-on in the esoteric world of asiatic primulas, the introduction of a new (or rather rediscovered) species is a matter of some excitement, and with all the lustfulness of a stamp collector in pursuit of a rarity we start considering whether there’s any possibility of acquiring and successfully growing the new arrival.

The tale of Primula melanantha, rediscovered after a century in a single location in Zheduo Shan, China in 2006, introduced to the UK in 2007 by David and Stella Rankin, mulled over by John Richards, and finally firmly allocated its place in the taxonomy by C-M Hu is best summed up in David’s article for Curtis’s Botanical Magazine. Behind the dry scientific prose lies the journey of so many of our garden plants – from the expedition to cold hillside or steamy jungle, to the herbarium, the laboratory, the search of ancient publications – not forgetting the botanical artist – for one of the charms of the botanical world is that no amount of digital photography is held to substitute for the traditional painting.

Maybe a little of the romance has gone….the expedition to bring back p.melanantha at first failed to find the plant, but a couple of trans-Pacific phone calls and a GPS reference rapidly put it on the right track.

So I acquired a couple of plants – an end-user for all this endeavour. “Enjoy killing them,” said Stella as she handed them over, and indeed I have killed many a ‘difficult’ primula in my time. Still, there is always hope.

One plant I have kept in its pot – an uninspiring mini-cabbage to those who haven’t caught the primula bug, but something to be cherished and nurtured for those who have:

The other I planted out on my north-facing, dripping, crumbly rock face behind the pond in heavily gritted compost with a layer of fine gravel round its neck. Well away from direct sun and surrounded by high humidty, it should be OK during its growing season.
The problems will start when it considers it’s time to be bedding down for the winter, waiting for the first snowfall and the drying up of the water. In Scotland it will still be warm and damp, and the long daylight will keep it growing just when it needs a rest.

Meanwhile, although it should really flower in May – the shock (and maybe horror) of its new surroundings has induced this plant to send out a flower stem – probably in desperation. P. melanantha varies in colour between black and deep violet. My specimen veers towards the violet, which doesn’t stop me thinking it very beautiful.

 

Candelabra Primulas

Among the vast primula tribe, the candelabras (section proliferae) are the easiest to grow, and hence much loved by gardeners who have a bit of damp and not too much heat. They aren’t especially fussy about soil type – some grow on limestone in the wild – and are, in general, usefully perennial and resistant to abuse. Their chief enemies are slugs (which gnaw out the resting buds) and moles, which can leave the tap roots dangling in the air of their tunnels. They really don’t like heat, though, and can be weakened by too much of it, after which they may succumb to all sorts of horrors.

There are many different ways of using these plants, but I use them to form blocks of colour rather than mixing them up. Their colours are intense, and can clash badly with each other if you are not careful. Some gardeners like  this effect, but I don’t, so I avoid mixed candelabra seed.

Primula ‘Inverewe’ grows happily with me in soggy yellow clay but many people find it difficult. It’s a hybrid, so has to be propogated by division. The intense orange of a bed in full flower is wonderful, but you do need to be a bit careful where you put it, as it dominates everything around it. I find it almost immune to cold, wet, or disease, and it grows happily with its tap roots down to the (non-stagnant) water table.

Primula puverulenta is equally intense in colour – and needs to be kept well away from ‘Inverewe’. It’s a lot more temperamental – largely because slugs will attack any weakened plant – and a lot less fond of clay. It also picks up a virus which stunts the leaves. I grow mine in deep wet compost, but with the roots kept above the water table. It’s a greedy plant and needs annual top-ups of humous-rich material. Part of the attraction is the meal (farina) which coats the stems in silvery yellow. Most of the prolifera are promiscuous in their habits, so you are better to propogate by division if you want to maintain a particular shade (see splittting candleabra primulas). However, p.pulverulenta sets seed readily, and it germinates equally readily, so you can build up a big collection quite rapidly.

For the orange/yellow shade, I rely on p.bulleyana. This is a really tough primula, which will even survive in turf (wet turf). It’s slower than the others to emerge in Spring, and usually flowers a week or two later – which is annoying. It gets mixed in with p.chungensis, which has flatter-faced flowers and lacks the crimson shade in the young bud, but is otherwise very similar. But the general tendency among the proliferae not to be too fussy about interbreeding means that trying to grow distinct species is usually a fool’s game. p.bulleyana refuses to set seed with me, so I divide it now and again. It forms fewer offshoots than the others, so it takes a little longer to build up a substantial block.

Finally (for the moment) we have p.aurantiaca. The virtue of this plant is in the black/dark red flower stem, which contrasts well with the vivid orange of the flowers. It’s smaller than the others, seems to appreciate rather more shade, and likes the soil a bit dryer (though certainly not dry) It’s slow to make clumps you can divide, and doesn’t set seed with me, so you need to take a little more trouble with it. Along with p.pulverulenta it dislikes having its roots undermined by moles, though slugs seem to leave it alone.

These primulas ought to grow in any garden that is reliably damp and reliably cool for the growing season. Winter (as always with primulas) is the time of most danger, unless you can provide good snow cover from October on. p.pulverulenta is particularly susceptible to rotting in mild rain-sodden winters.